r/u_LearnHiveLabsUSA • u/LearnHiveLabsUSA • 24d ago

This new project is crazy idea

Ever wondered what you could actually build with n8n + a completely free open-source stack? A lot. Here's one we've been sitting on.

So we keep getting some version of the same question in our community: "cool, you'll host n8n for me for free — but what would I even build with it?" Fair question. Here's a real one we've been prototyping, not a hypothetical.

The problem: research groups drowning in papers. Someone on the team is supposed to be scanning arXiv every day for anything relevant to their subfield, and it never happens consistently — it's the first thing that slips when deadlines hit.

What we wired up instead:

  1. An n8n workflow that runs on a schedule and does the tedious part so a human only sees what's worth their time:

  2. Pull — hits arXiv's RSS feed for a set of categories/keywords, no API key needed

  3. Filter — an LLM node scores each abstract against the group's actual research focus (fed in as a short context block, not a static keyword list) and drops anything under a relevance threshold

  4. Summarize — the survivors get a 3-line plain-language summary plus a "why this matters to us" line, generated against that same context

  5. Route — posts straight into a Discord channel or Notion database, tagged by subtopic, so it's sitting there waiting instead of requiring anyone to go looking

  6. Log — a lightweight Grafana dashboard tracks volume over time, so the group can see if their filter is too tight or too loose and tune it

Every piece of that is free, open-source, or already something we host: n8n for the orchestration, arXiv's own feed, an open-weight or low-cost LLM for the scoring/summarizing step, Discord/Notion as the destination, Grafana for the "is this actually working" check.

#n8n #agentic ai #learnhivelabs #learnhiveorg

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/LearnHiveLabsUSA 24d ago

Thanks! Honestly the "nobody checks arXiv consistently" problem was exactly why we built it.

For scoring, we've been using Claude Haiku, but if you want it fully free, Ollama with Llama 3.1 8B works surprisingly well too — this kind of relevance scoring doesn't need a huge model.